Raven II

History

The initial components of the Raven platform were developed in 2005 as part of a DARPA project on the future of battlefield medicine. Raven was designed as a mobile laparoscopic surgical system by a team of researchers led by Blake Hannaford, a professor of robotics at the University of Washington, in Seattle. The idea was making Raven as modular as possible, so it would be more portable than large surgical robots used in hospitals and could be reassembled by a small team of people. The Raven II was developed as a National Science Foundation project on collaborative research to advance surgical robotics. Seven Universities used the Raven II platform, including Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; University of Nebraska; University of California, Santa Cruz; University of California, Berkeley; and University of Washington. These labs investigated diverse problems involving surgical robots and related technologies and shared their experiences and breakthroughs using Raven as a common platform. Telesurgery experiments with the Raven have involved a remote surgeon operating the robot in the field, under extreme conditions, like underwater in a submarine pod or in high desert temperatures.